I can say that this thread inspired me to turn off the "legacy" button for Vector and see what's new. I thought that was bad, but Vito uses monobook!

Two things to acknowledge:

* We've heard many times over the years that the technical teams see their primary customer as the readers. Good or bad, we recognize that pleasing the readers does not require maintaining a highly modern editing interface. At the same time, editors remain fairly "sticky" - they don't leave in big numbers because of the interface, and they broadly prefer a slow pace of change. Together the result is a very slow and incremental pace of development progress for editor UX. 

* Most of us recognize that persuasion is the most effective way to create change. Being right is inadequate on its own. But sometimes persuasion fails and we remain convinced we are right. This creates frustration, even anger; it may look like someone fails to understand the value of making friends and influencing people, but it can simply be that other strategies have been exhausted and lighting a big fire is what remains. 

Nathan